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Authors: Jeffrey Archer

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BOOK: Twelve Red Herrings
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Despite my
passion for her, we didn’t make love until we were both eighteen, and even then
I wasn’t certain that we had consummated anything. Six weeks later she told me,
in a flood of tears, that she was pregnant. Against the wishes of her parents,
who had hoped that she would go on to university, a hasty wedding was arranged,
but as I never wanted to look at another girl for the rest of my life, I was
secretly delighted by the outcome of our youthful indiscretion.

Helen died on
the night of 4 September 964, giving birth to our son, Tom, who himself only
survived a week. I thought I would never get over it, and I’m not sure I ever
have. After her death I didn’t
so
much as glance at
another woman for years, putting all my energy into the company.

Following the
funeral of my wife and son, my father, not a soft or sentimental man – you
won’t find many of those in Yorkshire revealed a gentle side to his character
that I had never seen before.

He would often
phone me in the evening to see how I was getting on, and insisted that I
regularly joined him in the directors’ box at Elland Road to watch Leeds United
on Saturday afternoons. I began to understand, for the first time, why my
mother still adored him after more than twenty years of marriage.

I met Rosemary
about four years later at a ball given to launch the Leeds Music Festival. Not
a natural habitat for me, but as Cooper’s had taken a full-page advertisement
in the programme, and Brigadier Kershaw, the High Sheriff of the county and
Chair man of the Ball Committee, had invited us to join him as his guests, I
had no choice but to dress up in my seldom-worn dinner jacket and accompany my
parents to the ball.

I was placed on
Table 7, next to a Miss Kershaw, who turned out to be the High Sheriff’s
daughter. She was elegantly dressed in a strapless blue gown that emphasised
her comely figure, and had a mop of red hair and a smile that made me feel we
had been friends for years.

She told me over
something described on the menu as ‘avocado with dill’ that she had just
finished reading English at Durham University, and wasn’t quite sure what she
was going to do with her life.

“I don’t want to
be a teacher,” she said. “And I’m certainly not cut out to be a secretary.” We
chatted through the second and third courses, ignoring the people seated on
either side of us.

After coffee she
dragged me onto the dance floor, where she continued to explain the problems of
contemplating any form of work while her diary was so packed with social engagements.

I felt rather
flattered that the High Sheriff’s daughter should show the slightest interest
in me, and to be honest I didn’t take it seriously when at the end of the
evening, she whispered in my ear, “Let’s keep in touch.” But a couple of days
later she rang and invited me to join her and her parents for lunch that Sunday
at their house in the country, “And then perhaps we could play a little tennis
afterwards. You do play tennis, I suppose?” I drove over to Church Fenton on
Sunday, and found that the Kershaws’ residence was exactly what I would have
expected large and decaying, which, come to think of it, wasn’t a bad
description of Rosemary’s father as well. But he seemed a nice enough chap. Her
mother, however, wasn’t quite so easy to please. She originated from somewhere
in Hampshire, and was unable to mask her feeling that, although I might be good
for the occasional charitable donation, I was not quite the sort of person with
whom she expected to be sharing her Sunday lunch.

Rosemary ignored
the odd barbed comment from her, and continued to chat to me about my work.

As it rained all
afternoon we never got round to playing tennis, so Rosemary used the time to
seduce me in the little pavilion behind the court. At first I was nervous about
making love to the High Sheriff’s daughter, but I soon got used to the idea.

However, as the
weeks passed, I began to wonder if I was anything more to her than a ‘lorry
driver fantasy’. Until, that is, she started to talk about marriage. Mrs.
Kershaw was unable to hide her disgust at the very idea of someone like me
becoming her son-inlaw, but her opinion turned out to be irrelevant, as
Rosemary remained implacable on the subject. We were married eighteen months
later.

Over two hundred
guests attended the rather grand county wedding in the parish church of St
Mary’s. But I confess that when I turned to watch Rosemary progressing up the
aisle, my only thoughts were of my first wedding ceremony.

For a couple of
years Rosemary made every effort to be a good wife. She took an interest in the
company, learned the names of all the employees, even became friendly with the
wives of some of the senior executives. But, as I worked all the hours God
sent, I fear I may not always have given her as much attention as she needed.
You see, Rosemary yearned for a life that was made up of regular visits to the
Grand Theatre for Opera North, followed by dinner parties with her county
friends that would run into the early hours, while I preferred to work at
weekends, and to be tucked up in bed before eleven most nights. For Rosemary I
wasn’t turning out to be the husband in the title of the Oscar Wilde play she
had recently taken me to – and it didn’t help that I had fallen asleep during
the second act.

After four years
without producing any offspring – not that Rosemary wasn’t very energetic in
bed – we began to drift our separate ways. If she started having affairs (and I
certainly did, when I could find the time), she was discreet about them. And
then she met Jeremy Alexander.

It must have
been about six weeks after the seminar in Bristol that I had occasion to phone
Jeremy and seek his advice. I wanted to close a deal with a French cheese
company to transport its wares to British supermarkets. The previous year I had
made a large loss on a similar enterprise with a German beer company, and I
couldn’t afford to make the same mistake again.

“Send me all the
details,” Jeremy had said. “I’ll look over the paperwork at the weekend and
call you on Monday morning.” He was as good as his word, and when he phoned me
he mentioned that he had to be in York that Thursday to brief a client, and
suggested we get together the following day to go over the contract. I agreed,
and we spent most of that Friday closeted in the Cooper’s boardroom checking over
every dot and comma of the contract. It was a pleasure to watch such a
professional at work, even if Jeremy did occasionally display an irritating
habit of drumming his fingers on the table when I hadn’t immediately understood
what he was getting at.

Jeremy, it
turned out, had already talked to the French company’s in-house lawyer in
Toulouse about any reservations he might have. He assured me that, although
Monsieur Sisley spoke no English, he had made him fully aware of our anxieties.
I remember being struck by his use of the word ‘our’.

After we had
turned the last page of the contract, I realised that everyone else in the
building had left for the weekend, so I suggested to Jeremy that he might like
to join Rosemary and me for dinner. He checked his watch, considered the offer
for a moment, and then said, “Thank you, that’s very kind of you.

Could you drop
me back at the Queen’s Hotel so I can get
changed ?”
Rosemary, however, was not pleased to be told at the last minute that I had
invited a complete stranger to dinner without warning her, even though I
assured her that she would like him.

Jeremy rang our
front doorbell a few minutes after eight.

When I
introduced him to Rosemary, he bowed slightly and kissed her hand. After that,
they didn’t take their eyes off each other all evening. Only a blind man could
have missed what was likely to happen next, and although I might not have been
blind, I certainly turned a blind eye.

Jeremy was soon
finding excuses to spend more and more time in Leeds, and I am bound to admit
that his sudden enthusiasm for the north of England enabled me to advance my
ambitions for Cooper’s far more quickly than I had originally dreamed possible.
I had felt for some time that the company needed an in-house lawyer, and within
a year of our first meeting I offered Jeremy a place on the board, with the
remit to prepare the company for going public.

During that
period I spent a great deal of my time in Madrid, Amsterdam and Brussels
drumming up new contracts, and Rosemary certainly didn’t discourage me.
Meanwhile Jeremy skilfully guided the company through a thicket of legal and
financial problems caused by our expansion. Thanks to his diligence and
expertise, we were able to announce on x2 February x98o that Cooper’s would be
applying for a listing on the Stock Exchange later that year. It was then that
I made my first mistake: I invited Jeremy to become Deputy Chairman of the
company.

Under the terms
of the flotation, fifty-one per cent of the shares would be retained by
Rosemary and
myself
. Jeremy explained to me that for
tax reasons they should be divided equally between us. My accountants agreed,
and at the time I didn’t give it a second thought.

The remaining
4,900,000 one pound shares were quickly taken up by institutions and the general
public, and within days of the company being listed on the Stock Exchange their
value had risen to 2.80.

My father, who
had died the previous year, would never have accepted that it was possible to
become worth several million pounds overnight. In fact I suspect he would have
disapproved of the very idea, as he went to his deathbed still believing that a
ten-pound overdraft was quite adequate to conduct a well-run business.

During the 98os
the British economy showed continual growth, and by March 984 Cooper’s shares
had topped the fivepound mark, following press speculation about a possible
takeover. Jeremy had advised me to accept one of the bids, but 1 told him that
I would never allow Cooper’s to be let out of the family’s control. After that,
we had to split the shares on three separate occasions, and by x989 the Sunday
Times was estimating that Rosemary and I were together worth around thirty
million pounds.

I had never
thought of myself as being wealthy – after all, as far as I was concerned the
shares were simply pieces of paper held by Joe Ramsbottom, our company
solicitor. I still lived in my father’s house, drove a five-year-old Jaguar,
and worked fourteen hours a day. I had never cared much for holidays, and
wasn’t by nature extravagant.

Wealth seemed
somehow irrelevant to me.

I would have
been happy to continue living much as I was, had I not arrived home
unexpectedly one night.

I had caught the
last plane back to Heathrow after a particularly long and arduous negotiation
in Cologne, and had originally intended to stay overnight in London. But by
then I’d had enough of hotels, and simply wanted to get home, despite the long
drive.

When I arrived
back in Leeds a few minutes after one, I found Jeremy’s white BMW parked in the
driveway.

Had I phoned
Rosemary earlier that day, I might never have ended up in jail.

I parked my car
next to Jeremy’s, and was walking towards the front door when I noticed that
there was only one light on in the house - in the front room on the first
floor. It wouldn’t have taken Sherlock Holmes to deduce what might be taking
place in that particular room.

I came to a
halt, and stared up at the drawn curtains for some time. Nothing stirred, so
clearly they hadn’t heard the car, and
were
unaware of
my presence. I retraced my steps and drove quietly off in the direction of the
city centre. When I arrived at the Queen’s Hotel I asked the duty manager if
Mr. Jeremy Alexander had booked a room for the night. He checked the register
and confirmed that he had.

“Then I’ll take
his key,” I told him. “Mr. Alexander has booked himself in somewhere else for
the night.” My father would have been proud of such thrifty use of the
company’s resources.

I lay on the
hotel bed, quite unable to sleep, my anger rising as each hour passed.
Although !
no
longer had a great
deal of feeling for Rosemary, and even accepted that perhaps I never had, I now
loathed Jeremy. But it wasn’t until the next day that I discovered just how
much I loathed him.

The following
morning I rang my secretary, and told her I would be driving to the office
straight from London. She reminded me that there was a board meeting scheduled
for two o’clock, which Mr. Alexander was pencilled in to chair. I was glad she
couldn’t see the smile of satisfaction that spread across my face. A quick
glance at the agenda over breakfast and it had become abundantly clear why
Jeremy had wanted to chair this particular meeting. But his plans didn’t matter
any more. I had already decided to let my fellow directors know exactly what he
was up to, and to make sure that he was dismissed from the board as soon as was
practicable.

I arrived at
Cooper’s just after .3o, and parked in the space marked “Chairman’. By the time
the board meeting was scheduled to begin I’d had just enough time to check over
my files, and became painfully aware of how many of the company’s shares were
now controlled by Jeremy, and what he and Rosemary must have been planning for
some time.

BOOK: Twelve Red Herrings
11.1Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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